Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

  So it began. Had it been waiting for her since the day she had been taken from her father’s arms? The world in which she now found herself was not unlike the world from which she had, so long ago, been rescued. Here were the women who had been the cause of her aunt’s most passionate condemnation of her father—hard-drinking, hard-talking, with whisky- and cigarette-breath, and moving with the mystic authority of women who knew what sweet violence might be acted out under the moon and stars, or beneath the tigerish lights of the city, in the raucous hay or the singing bed. And was she, Elizabeth, so sweetly fallen, so tightly chained, one of these women now? And here were the men who had come day and night to visit her father’s “stable”—with their sweet talk and their music, and their violence and their sex—black, brown, and beige, who looked on her with lewd, and lustful, and laughing eyes. And these were Richard’s friends. Not one of them ever went to church—one might scarcely have imagined that they knew that churches existed—they all, hourly, daily, in their speech, in their lives, and in their hearts, cursed God. They all seemed to be saying, as Richard, when she once timidly mentioned the love of Jesus, said: “You can tell that puking bastard to kiss my big black ass.”

  She, for very terror on hearing this, had wept; yet she could not deny that for such an abundance of bitterness there was a positive fountain of grief. There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other. Now she understood in this nervous, hollow, ringing city, that nervousness of Richard’s which had so attracted her—a tension so total, and so without the hope, or possibility of release, or resolution, that she felt it in his muscles, and heard it in his breathing, even as on her breast he fell asleep.

  And this was perhaps why she had never thought to leave him, frightened though she was during all that time, and in a world in which, had it not been for Richard, she could have found no place to put her feet. She did not leave him, because she was afraid of what might happen to him without her. She did not resist him, because he needed her. And she did not press about marriage because, upset as he was about everything, she was afraid of having him upset about her, too. She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even tonight, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry?

  They had been very happy together, in the beginning; and until the very end he had been very good to her, had not ceased to love her, and tried always to make her know it. No more than she had been able to accuse her father had she ever been able to accuse him. His weakness she understood, and his terror, and even his bloody end. What life had made him bear, her lover, this wild, unhappy boy, many another stronger and more virtuous man might not have borne so well.

  Saturday was their best day, for they only worked until one o’clock. They had all the afternoon to be together, and nearly all of the night, since Madame Williams had her seances on Saturday night and preferred that Elizabeth, before whose silent skepticism departed spirits might find themselves reluctant to speak, should not be in the house. They met at the service entrance. Richard was always there before her, looking, oddly, much younger and less anonymous without the ugly, tight-fitting, black uniform that he had to wear when working. He would be talking, or laughing with some of the other boys, or shooting craps, and when he heard her step down the long, stone hall he would look up, laughing; and wickedly nudging one of the other boys, he would half shout, half sing: “He-y! Look-a-there, ain’t she pretty?”

  She never failed, at this—which was why he never failed to do it—to blush, half smiling, half frowning, and nervously to touch the collar of her dress.

  “Sweet Georgia Brown!” somebody might say.

  “Miss Brown to you,” said Richard, then, and took her arm.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” somebody else would say, “you better hold on to little Miss Bright-eyes, don’t somebody sure going to take her away from you.”

  “Yeah,” said another voice, “and it might be me.”

  “Oh, no,” said Richard, moving with her toward the street, “ain’t nobody going to take my Little-bit away from me.”

  Little-bit: it had been his name for her. And sometimes he called her Sandwich Mouth, or Funnyface, or Frog-eyes. She would not, of course, have endured these names from anyone else, nor, had she not found herself, with joy and helplessness (and a sleeping panic), living it out, would she ever have suffered herself so publicly to become a man’s property—“concubine,” her aunt would have said, and at night, alone, she rolled the word, tart like lemon rind, on her tongue.

  She was descending with Richard to the sea. She would have to climb back up alone, but she did not know this then. Leaving the boys in the hall, they gained the midtown New York streets.

  “And what we going to do today, Little-bit?” With that smile of his, and those depthless eyes, beneath the towers of the white city, with people, white, hurrying all around them.

  “I don’t know, honey. What you want to do?”

  “Well, maybe, we go to a museum.”

  The first time he suggested this, she demanded, in panic, if they would be allowed to enter.

  “Sure, they let niggers in,” Richard said. “Ain’t we got to be educated, too—to live with the motherfuckers?”

  He never “watched” his language with her, which at first she took as evidence of his contempt because she had fallen so easily, and which later she took as evidence of his love.

  And when he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand.

  For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this. She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him.

  But on other Saturdays they went to see a movie; they went to see a play; they visited his friends; they walked through Central Park. She liked the park because, however spuriously, it re-created something of the landscape she had known. How many afternoons had they walked there! She had always, since, avoided it. They bought peanuts and for hours fed the animals at the zoo; they bought soda pop and drank it on the grass; they walked along the reservoir and Richard explained how a city like New York found water to drink. Mixed with her fear for him was a total admiration: that he had learned so young, so much. People stared at them but she did not mind; he noticed, but he did not seem to notice. But sometimes he would ask, in the middle of a sentence—concerned, possibly, with ancient Rome:

  “Little-bit—d’you love me?”

  And she wondered how he could doubt it. She thought how infirm she must be not to have been able to make him know it; and she raised her eyes to his, and she said the only thing she co
uld say:

  “I wish to God I may die if I don’t love you. There ain’t no sky above us if I don’t love you.”

  Then he would look ironically up at the sky, and take her arm with a firmer pressure, and they would walk on.

  Once, she asked him:

  “Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?”

  And he looked at her a long moment. Then:

  “Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. I didn’t hardly go to school at all.”

  “Then how come you got to be so smart? How come you got to know so much?”

  And he smiled, pleased, but he said: “Little-bit, I don’t know so much.” Then he said, with a change in his face and voice which she had grown to know: “I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. Shit—he weren’t going to beat my ass, then. And if he tried to kill me, I’d take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.” Then he looked at her again, and smiled and kissed her, and he said: “That’s how I got to know so much, baby.”

  She asked: “And what you going to do, Richard? What you want to be?”

  And his face clouded. “I don’t know. I got to find out. Looks like I can’t get my mind straight nohow.”

  She did not know why he couldn’t—or she could only dimly face it—but she knew he spoke the truth.

  She had made her great mistake with Richard in not telling him that she was going to have a child. Perhaps, she thought now, if she had told him everything might have been very different, and he would be living yet. But the circumstances under which she had discovered herself to be pregnant had been such to make her decide, for his sake, to hold her peace awhile. Frightened as she was, she dared not add to the panic that overtook him on the last summer of his life.

  And yet perhaps it was, after all, this—this failure to demand of his strength what it might then, most miraculously, have been found able to bear; by which—indeed, how could she know?—his strength might have been strengthened, for which she prayed tonight to be forgiven. Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.

  She lived quite a long way from Richard—four subway stops; and when it was time for her to go home, he always took the subway uptown with her and walked her to her door. On a Saturday when they had forgotten the time and stayed together later than usual, he left her at her door at two o’clock in the morning. They said good night hurriedly, for she was afraid of trouble when she got upstairs—though, in fact, Madame Williams seemed astonishingly indifferent to the hours Elizabeth kept—and he wanted to hurry back home and go to bed. Yet, as he hurried off down the dark, murmuring street, she had a sudden impulse to call him back, to ask him to take her with him and never let her go again. She hurried up the steps, smiling a little at this fancy: it was because he looked so young and defenseless as he walked away, and yet so jaunty and strong.

  He was to come the next evening at suppertime, to make at last, at Elizabeth’s urging, the acquaintance of Madame Williams. But he did not come. She drove Madame Williams wild with her sudden sensitivity to footsteps on the stairs. Having told Madame Williams that a gentleman was coming to visit her, she did not dare, of course, to leave the house and go out looking for him, thus giving Madame Williams the impression that she dragged men in off the streets. At ten o’clock, having eaten no supper, a detail unnoticed by her hostess, she went to bed, her head aching and her heart sick with fear; fear over what had happened to Richard, who had never kept her waiting before; and fear involving all that was beginning to happen in her body.

  And on Monday morning he was not at work. She left during the lunch hour to go to his room. He was not there. His landlady said that he had not been there all weekend. While Elizabeth stood trembling and indecisive in the hall, two white policemen entered.

  She knew the moment she saw them, and before they mentioned his name, that something terrible had happened to Richard. Her heart, as on that bright summer day when he had first spoken to her, gave a terrible bound and then was still, with an awful, wounded stillness. She put out one hand to touch the wall in order to keep standing.

  “This here young lady was just looking for him,” she heard the landlady say.

  They all looked at her.

  “You his girl?” one of the policemen asked.

  She looked up at his sweating face, on which a lascivious smile had immediately appeared, and straightened, trying to control her trembling.

  “Yes,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “He’s in jail, honey,” the other policeman said.

  “What for?”

  “For robbing a white man’s store, black girl. That’s what for.”

  She found, and thanked Heaven for it, that a cold, stony rage had entered her. She would, otherwise, certainly have fallen down, or begun to weep. She looked at the smiling policeman.

  “Richard ain’t robbed no store,” she said. “Tell me where he is.”

  “And I tell you,” he said, not smiling, “that your boy-friend robbed a store and he’s in jail for it. He’s going to stay there, too—now, what you got to say to that?”

  “And he probably did it for you, too,” the other policeman said. “You look like a girl a man could rob a store for.”

  She said nothing; she was thinking how to get to see him, how to get him out.

  One of them, the smiler, turned now to the landlady and said: “Let’s have the key to his room. How long’s he been living here?”

  “About a year,” the landlady said. She looked unhappily at Elizabeth. “He seemed like a real nice boy.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, mounting the steps, “they all seem like real nice boys when they pay their rent.”

  “You going to take me to see him?” she asked of the remaining policeman. She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

  “Sure, girl,” he said, “you’re coming right along with us. The man at the station house wants to ask you some questions.”

  The smiling policeman came down again. “Ain’t nothing up there,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  She moved between them, out into the sun. She knew that there was nothing to be gained by talking to them any more. She was entirely in their power; she would have to think faster than they could think; she would have to contain her fear and her hatred, and find out what could be done. Not for anything short of Richard’s life, and not, possibly, even for that, would she have wept before them, or asked of them a kindness.

  A small crowd, children and curious passers-by, followed them as they walked the long, dusty, sunlit street. She hoped only that they would not pass anyone she knew; she kept her head high, looking straight ahead, and felt the skin settle over her bones as though she were wearing a mask.

  And at the station she somehow got past their brutal laughter. (What was he doing with you, girl, until two o’clock in the morning?—Next time you feel like that, girl, you come by here and talk to me.) She felt that she was about to burst, or vomit, or die. Though the sweat stood out cruelly, like needles, on her brow, and she felt herself, from every side, being covered with a stink and filth, she found out, in their own good time, what she wanted to know: he was being held in a prison downtown called the Tombs (the name made her heart turn over), and she could see him tomorrow. The state, or the prison, or someone, had already assigned him a lawyer; he w
ould be brought to trial next week.

  But the next day, when she saw him, she wept. He had been beaten, he whispered to her, and he could hardly walk. His body, she later discovered, bore almost no bruises, but was full of strange, painful swellings, and there was a welt above one eye.

  He had not, of course, robbed the store, but, when he left her that Saturday night, had gone down into the subway station to wait for his train. It was late, and trains were slow; he was all alone on the platform, only half awake, thinking, he said, of her.

  Then, from the far end of the platform, he heard a sound of running; and, looking up, he saw two colored boys come running down the steps. Their clothes were torn, and they were frightened; they came up the platform and stood near him, breathing hard. He was about to ask them what the trouble was when, running across the tracks toward them, and followed by a white man, he saw another colored boy; and at the same instant another white man came running down the subway steps.

  Then he came full awake, in panic; he knew that whatever the trouble was, it was now his trouble also; for these white men would make no distinction between him and the three boys they were after: they were all colored, they were about the same age, and here they stood together on the subway platform. And they were all, with no questions asked, herded upstairs, and into the wagon and to the station house.